Asia Pac networks filled with entertainment

Asia-Pacific bandwidth is increasingly being consumed by users of ‘real-time entertainment’ according to the latest Sandvine Internet Phenomena Report.

The category includes on demand content such as streamed or buffered audio and video via platforms such as YouTube, Google Video or Spotify. real-time entertainment is the dominant downstream application category, accounting for 43.6 percent of downstream bytes. Combined with web browsing, these two categories represent 70.5 percent of all downstream traffic in Asia-Pacific.

Meanwhile on the upstream, Asia-Pac has emerged as one of the only regions where P2P Filesharing is not the top category on fixed access networks.

Entertainment junkies have hogged the network with real-time entertainment as the top category, with the bulk of this traffic bolstered by peercasting video applications.

The most popular of these applications, PPStream, accounts for 34.77 percent of total upstream traffic during peak hours.

Median monthly usage is 17.7 GB, the largest ever charted by the report. Collectively, the top 1 percent of heaviest upstream users account for 14.1 percent of total upstream usage and 9.6 percent of downstream usage. By comparison, the lightest 40 percent of subscribers overall only account for 10 percent of traffic.

On the mobile front real-time entertainment is again the dominant category on both the upstream and the downstream, taking up 41.4 percent of aggregate traffic during the peak period. The drivers here are again peercasting applications like PPStream, and the saturation of devices with high-quality display.

In the US, Sandvine reports that Netflix maintains leadership as the largest consumer of internet bandwidth, creating 32 percent of peak downstream traffic. Netflix, HTTP, YouTube and BitTorrent take out the bulk of all network traffic account for 64.4 percent. ®